3

Ambrosia

The bastard sent bratwurst to the entire building for lunch.

I saved mine. I cut it up in little pieces, tossed the carnage in one of the glass storage jars Crunchy provides for employees to borrow in an effort to save the world, and took it home.

Tomorrow I’ll come to my senses and realize that just because Chase Jett once hid raw chicken gizzards in my dollhouse and is now taunting me with the lowest moment of my life doesn’t mean I should break into his Upper East Side brownstone and hide decaying chunks of bratwurst in his curtain rods.

Yes, I Googled him and I know where he lives. It’s not stalking. Just wanted to make sure we wouldn’t be on the same subway home or shopping at the same neighborhood Crunchy.

My upstairs neighbors are at it again. Squeaky-squeaky-squeeeeeeeak.

“Woo pig sooie,” I call to the ceiling.

Hogzilla’s mating squeal is my answer.

I feed Dolphin, my goldfish, and water Gabby, my aloe plant on the fire escape, before grabbing my keyboard for band practice. I might be headed for the unemployment office tomorrow, but that’s no excuse to miss rehearsals. A girl needs a career backup plan.

Parker and I play in a boy band cover band at a bar on 23rd and 7th most Saturday nights. Okay, fine. It’s a juice bar, but that’s by choice. Anyway, Parker has mad guitar skills. I can carry a tune and plunk out a little more than Chopsticks.

We picked up Eloise at a yoga class. None of us know what she does for her day job, but she can bang the hell out of a set of drums. Willow is our lead vocalist. She does an uncanny Justin Timberlake, and I don’t care what those other boy band cover bands offer her—or if her stepfather, who’s literally the king of a tiny Viking nation, ever demands that she leave New York to move to her step-home country—I will fight to the death to keep her.

She’s ours. Don’t even think about it, man. I will cut you. With my mad sarcasm skills, because that’s pretty much all I have after the great knife-and-superglue incident in high school—thanks again, Chase Jett—but you get the point.

I arrive at Parker’s building and head to the basement, but my three musicians-in-crime aren’t set up to practice.

Unless you use the word practice lightly, in which case we might be preparing for Oktoberfest. In May. With whisky.

I take one look at the three of them huddled around a bottle of Crown in the middle of the laundry room, and my chest squeezes. “Hey, guys. What’s up?”

It’s Willow, I’m certain. She’s a slender, sparkly-eyed, dark-haired optimist engaged to a socially- and royally-acceptable day trader who works too much and has too many cats. If he weren’t the sweetest man on the entire planet—weird for a day-trading cat lover, I know, but it’s Martin—we might’ve staged an intervention long before he gave her a ring, and not just because it took him seven years to propose. Still, wedding planning has been something akin to mud wrestling a giraffe in a lava pit, and only partially because she’s having the wedding in her stepfather’s kingdom.

They turn as one to glare at me, and I realize it’s not Willow and her wedding plans prompting the alcohol. Nor is Eloise having issues with a new boyfriend, nor is Parker freaking out that she’s going to be fired.

Parker gives me the wide-eyeball I am furious with you sit down right now you have so much explaining to do can I borrow that dress I LOVE it finger point of doom. “Sit.”

“You’re not from Philadelphia,” Willow says.

“Pittsburgh,” Eloise corrects.

See? No one can keep those Pennsylvania P-cities straight. Or spell Pennsylvania right the first time. It’s the perfect cover. Or, it was until today.

Thanks, Google. And thanks, grocery store-buying Dick.

“There either.” Parker shoves her phone in my face, and before I can make out the teensy-tiny words—I get the joy of a challenge, but I think she could’ve picked a better character-building challenge than tiny-print-reading—the shrieking starts.

“You were arrested naked in the Bratwurst Wagon in Hottie McBillionaire’s Minnesota hometown!” is basically the gist of it.

And it’s all true.

Also, incomplete, but I don’t think my friends will appreciate that at the moment.

“Did you know him?” Willow demands.

“More important, did you sleep with him?” Eloise has this three-pack-a-day voice that she says runs in her mother’s family, and she carries a lighter because it’s easier than repeating Sorry, I don’t smoke fourteen times a day.

“Shut up.” Parker’s getting more shrill than Willow when she does her Jordan Knight impersonation. “Friends tell each other things. Things like this.”

I reach for the Crown and take a hit straight from the bottle. “Yes, yes, and I’m only sorry I got caught,” I reply in answer to their questions.

Parker sucks in a horrified breath.

Eloise perks up though. “Go on.”

“Can I keep this?” I wave the bottle at them.

“In Royal Veritas,” Willow says.

My mother was a Greek philosophy professor at the University of Minnesota extension down the road—if you think Ambrosia May is bad, my twin brothers are Zeus November and Ares February. While I could pick a Greek god out of a lineup, Latin is lost on me.

“In Crown Royal, there is truth,” Eloise translates. “And we want the whole truth.”

Outside of work hours, my band is my family. If I could’ve had sisters, I would’ve picked these three. Given my brothers, picking sisters was safer than leaving it to the luck of the freakish genetic combinations my parents were capable of making. But the point is, I know about Eloise’s sixth toe, Willow’s fear of butterflies, and Parker’s obsession with Tarzan.

We’re as tight as if we’re actually blood sisters, and I owe them the truth.

“Yes, I was arrested for grand theft Bratwurst Wagon when I was eighteen,” I confess to their expectant faces.

“That is so fucking cool,” Eloise whispers in her deep rasp.

“My little stunt, as my parents called it, got me expelled from Vassar before I even started.”

I glug off the bottle again while the three of them wince together. I love my job, I love living in the city, I love my friends, but Vassar would’ve been the difference between low-level management at a small-organic-potatoes grocery store and a full marketing gig at Whole Foods.

“The naked part?” Eloise prompts.

“Ritualistic virginity shedding with my brothers’ best friend.” I go for a casual shrug and miss the mark by my whole body. It wasn’t casual then. It was—I don’t know what it was.

Fierce. Angry. Competitive.

Un-fucking-believably hot. Dirty. Wicked.

Double-orgasmic.

Transcendent.

And just plain wrong.

“Doesn’t everyone want to do it in the Bratwurst Wagon?” I ask to their slack-jawed response.

“Must be a Minnesota thing,” Parker says darkly.

I obviously have some work to do to get off my friends’ shit lists. Crown Royal, give me strength.

“I didn’t plan it.” I grab my phone and open the Dick List. Right there on top is his name. Chase. Dick Number One. Parker’s added two dicks to the list. Eloise has seven. Willow doesn’t like to call people dicks, so we added her landlord and three stepbrothers for her. “Once he hid all my Barbies’ clothes and told me they were prostitutes damned to Hell. I was, like, seven. He ripped every other page out of my copy of The Secret Garden. Every time he’d come over, he’d be like, Hey, Bro, got something for you and then he’d pull a dead mosquito out of his pocket and hand it to me one wing and leg at a time. And that was all before puberty.”

“He sounds disturbed,” Willow murmurs.

My mom had told me once that we didn’t know what went on behind closed doors, and we should all be thankful that a boy like Chase had such good influences as my brothers.

That should tell you something right there.

Or she had a momentary lapse in reality. These were the same brothers who had convinced me that I’d die if I didn’t eat a teaspoon of boogers every day and who donated to the cause.

“I don’t know what his deal was, but when he gave me a case of canned baloney for my twelfth birthday, I was done. I started pranking him back. After six years of war, the Bratwurst Wagon came to town for the baloney festival, and I knew if I didn’t do something first, he would. I was going to leave a trail of sausages from the Bratwurst Wagon to his house, but he was already there, armed with spray paint.”

“I think I see where this is going,” Eloise says.

“The two of us breaking into the Bratwurst Wagon, having mad angry sex on the floor under the sausages, and then trying to Bonnie and Clyde our way out of trouble? Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.”

As much as I wanted to relive out loud anyway.

Hey, Bro. I can’t decide if I should draw a picture of you, or if I should just write Bro Likes To Eat Me on this giant wrinkled sausage, he’d said when I’d caught him with the spray paint.

I’d told him to fuck off. He’d told me to fuck him. I’d said he couldn’t handle me. He’d said I should put my mouth where his dick was.

And somehow we’d discovered the Bratwurst Wagon was open, with the keys in the ignition, and flinging insults at each other was weirdly erotic, and then we’d gone at each other like—well, like my upstairs neighbors, though I prefer to think I was more lioness than Miss Piggy.

I’d felt supercharged. Electrified. More alive than alive.

And somewhere in the hazy midst of lust and fury, right between me telling him he had a crooked dick and him shoving it so deep inside me I couldn’t tell where he ended and I began—or if he’d get stuck in there, I was a virgin, I didn’t know—I saw the oddest craving in his eyes.

Like he wanted to stay there. With me. All night.

Say something nice. Lick a soft trail up my neck instead of sinking his teeth into my tender skin. Trace his name on my belly.

His barriers had gone up so fast I was sure I’d imagined it, but what if I hadn’t?

And that’s when the flash of red and blue lights had come through the front window of the Bratwurst Wagon.

“He wasn’t mentioned in the article we found on you,” Parker says.

“We saw the lights, he said Go, and while I went for the keys, he went for the back door.”

Willow sucks in a grin. “That’s a rather impressive misunderstanding.”

“Or one hell of a setup.”

“Aw, Sia, you really think he set you up?”

“I told the cops he was with me, but he denied everything. Which left me the crazy naked chick leading the police on a thirty-mile-an-hour Bratwurst Wagon chase around Wishberry Lake at two in the morning.”

Parker’s nose is flaring, lips twitching. Willow’s not even trying to suppress her laughter. And yeah—ten years later, I can see how it might be funny to someone who didn’t end up sleeping on a concrete jail floor and then pled guilty to public indecency and destruction of property to get the grand theft auto charge dropped, only to get a phone call rescinding my enrollment to my dream college while being crowned the new laughingstock of my hometown. The hometown I still haven’t been back to.

My family comes to me for the holidays. They don’t even ask me to go home.

Maybe it’s still not funny.

Only Eloise isn’t laughing. “How does a guy go from being a grade-A dick to a billionaire buying out organic grocery stores?” she asks.

“Don’t know, don’t care.” I take another swig of whisky.

“You remember when Frenemy Crush was huge on Facebook?” Parker asks.

Cold dread washes over me. “That matching game that uses your six least favorite Facebook friends’ profile pictures for game pieces that you explode with flaming darts and volcanic blasts?” I whisper.

“Yeah, that one.”

“I fucking loved that game,” Eloise growls.

“At my mom’s wedding, I saw the princes playing it using the profile pictures of the heads of other countries,” Willow says.

“Mr. Jett built it,” Parker tells us.

“The Dick,” I correct.

“The Dick.” She nods. “Anyway, he made a killing on the game, invested his profits in some tech startups that paid off big-time, and now he’s diversifying. Healthcare, energy, transportation. He even owns a small publishing company.”

“Great. All he needs is a construction company and a bank and he can buy his own town and the friends to put in it.”

“I wouldn’t move there,” Willow says.

Eloise smiles darkly. “I would, but only to poison the water supply.”

Have I mentioned my undying love for Eloise? And that’s not the alcohol talking. “Anyway, the good news is, I’ll have way more time to practice my keyboard skills soon.”

“What? Why?” Parker asks.

“My current moral dilemma. Refuse to let Chase Jett’s presence in my workplace affect me and do my job anyway like a big girl, or quit because I refuse to let him boss me around while he profits off my work? And let’s not forget to take into account the increased probability that I’ll be terminated because of our history.”

“If he fires you because he banged you and left you in the Bratwurst Wagon, you can sue him for wrongful termination,” Willow offers.

I almost smile. Willow said banged.

“But if she decorates his office with dicks and sends a company-wide exposé memo, he’ll almost have to fire her, and then she can call in the lawyers.” Eloise for the win, ladies and gentleman.

“Being fired wouldn’t be all terrible.” I hiccup. “Maybe I’ll be a subway performer. I could start writing original songs. I went to jail for banging a billionaire in the Bratwurst Wagon has a ring to it, don’t you think?”

And to think, I’ve wasted a decade of my life being mortified by my youthful discretion. I’d level up in cool points with at least half the marketing department if they knew.

“Uh-oh,” Parker says.

“What?”

“Anti-dick moves. According to Wikipedia, he runs in the St. Jude Marathon every year. Also, since officially reaching billionaire status two years ago, he’s built a new no-kill shelter in upstate Minnesota and started a foundation that’s running food banks in four states.”

“If I had a billion dollars, I could buy a PR company and look like an angel too.” Eloise taps a drumstick against her thigh. “You know what you need to do, don’t you?”

“Legally change my name and apply to be a maid at Willow’s stepdad’s place? They need fresh, young, non-incestuous blood to bear a few royal babies, don’t they?”

Willow goes pink. “I don’t think my stepbrothers have any issues finding non-incestuous blood.”

“You need to sleep with him again,” Eloise declares.

I’ve mentioned how much I hate Eloise, haven’t I?

She pushes her cats-eye glasses back up her nose. “You’re lacking in closure.”

“The only closure I need is to not work for the man who let me take the fall for our Bratwurst Wagon adventure. Either he goes or I go.”

Eloise taps her drumstick again. “Do you want to go?”

“Um, no.”

“Then we need a plan. He might have a billion dollars, but we have something he doesn’t.”

All three of us stare at her blankly.

“The collective outrage of scorned women everywhere,” she says as though it should be obvious.

“Uh, sure,” Parker says.

“We owe it to women everywhere to show this pompous prick that we’re done doing jail time for his crimes while he rakes in the dough.”

“I’d rather just forget it ever happened,” I say. And honestly? I would. All of it. I’ve moved on. He’s moved on. My brothers have moved on.

The Bratwurst Wagon has moved on.

Maybe in another ten or twenty years, I’ll even be able to go home again.

“But I’d feel happier staying at Crunchy if he agreed to donate fifty percent of his profits to charity every year. That’s reasonable, right? Then I’m not working for him. I’m working for charity.”

“Charity?” Eloise snorts. “No, the man has to pay, and we’re just the women to make him do it. We collectively have ten brothers. If anyone can find ways to torture a man, we can.”

“Um, can we not count mine?” Willow says. “I don’t know them all that well.”

“That’s okay. Mine count for three apiece,” I tell her.

“That’s eleven brothers then.” Eloise smiles. “We’re going to hand this dick his balls.”